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Exercising the OAI-PMH tools

In order to resolve UIHAADM-2 (Detect set names and metadata prefixes from OAI-PMH services), we are planning to use the oai-pmh library. This seems to be fairly simple, minimal code, as we would hope, but is not quite a fully documented as we might wish.

Here is how to install it for local use:

mkdir /tmp/x
cd /tmp/x
yarn add oai-pmh

Next, choose a repository to query: if you don't have one, there is a list at https://www.openarchives.org/Register/BrowseSites. For brevity, we assign it to an exported variable.

export OAI_URL=https://ora.ox.ac.uk/oai2

Here is how to exercise the OAI-PMH library via its command-line interface, using all six OAI-PMH verbs:

  • Identify (get information about the service)
  • ListSets (fetch names of sets of records)
  • ListMetadataFormats (determine which formats records can be retrieved in)
  • ListIdentifiers (fetch brief records; metadata prefix must be specified)
  • ListRecords (fetch full records; metadata prefix must be specified)
  • GetRecord (fetch a single full record by ID)

(We use ./node_modules/bin/oai-pmh rather than yarn oai-pmh because the latter emits boilerplate on startup and ending which prevents jq from parsing the JSON that is the actual output.)

./node_modules/.bin/oai-pmh identify $OAI_URL | jq
./node_modules/.bin/oai-pmh list-sets $OAI_URL | jq
./node_modules/.bin/oai-pmh list-metadata-formats $OAI_URL | jq

Now choose one of the metadata prefixes returned in the last response, for example base_dc, and use it as the argument to the -p option in list-identifiers or list-records. (We don't feed the results though jq in these cases, as they can be very long and it's better to see the responses as they stream back.)

./node_modules/.bin/oai-pmh list-identifiers $OAI_URL -p base_dc
# or
./node_modules/.bin/oai-pmh list-records $OAI_URL -p base_dc

Finally, choose an identifier from the list-identifiers result, for example oai:ora.ox.ac.uk:uuid:0080989d-b09c-47f6-95a5-e04f4530a915, and use it to fetch the full record:

./node_modules/.bin/oai-pmh get-record $OAI_URL -p base_dc -i oai:ora.ox.ac.uk:uuid:0080989d-b09c-47f6-95a5-e04f4530a915 | jq